


how you deal with everything that's out of your own control

by eudaimon



Category: Amanda Palmer (musician) - Who Killed Amanda Palmer (album)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 17:33:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two people meet on a train and nobody knows where they're going, and both of them remember what they've done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how you deal with everything that's out of your own control

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Diena](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Diena).



> This story is sort of a crossover of two songs: Strength through Music and Runs in the Family and, because of the nature of those songs and the characters in those songs, there are some slightly disturbing themes in this story.
> 
> I hope it's what you were hoping for!  
> Happy Christmas!

In the weak light from the window she turns her hands and looks at the blood caked under her nails. She wishes that she had something to scrape under them but there's nothing in her purse but dried up nail polish and greasy dollar bills. She finds half a packet of peanut butter cups. There's a picture of her family. Carefully, she tears her daughter's face out and tucks it into a pocket which zips closed.

The rest she all but shreds. She twitches the pieces apart with her fingers and sprinkles them over her knees like confetti at a wedding. Like virgin snow.

She's concentrating so hard that she doesn't even notice that he's watching her. She'd barely even registered him past the dull thudding of the base bleeding from his headphones. It's not her kind of music, but it's sort of the music that she's always chosen to dance to when she's at work. It's got a lot of beat to find. It's not something she'd accidentally listen to at home.

"What are you doing?" he asks her and she combs her fingers through her tattered red hair and she bites the corner of her nail and she wonders who it is she's tasting on the tip of her tongue. Blood is thicker than water, right? She wishes she had some water; the taste in her mouth is dry and bitter. She's seen guys like him before - they come to the club, sit in the front row, tip only in singles. They never have to be warned about touching and they probably come in their pants before they go home.

Creeper.

"Forgetting," she tells him. "I'm doing my best to forget."  
"Why?" In his lap, he playing with a cellphone, one of the fancy kind that you can take pictures with, check your email with, all that shit. She's lucky if hers decides to make calls two days running.  
"Why what?"

His mouth twitches with a smile. It's like his face isn't really made for smiling; flat, mousey hair tumbles across his forehead and he drips his head and nothing touches his eyes.

"Why would you want to forget everything?"

Suddenly, her spine snaps straighter and there's this feeling that she sometimes gets when she sees a particular guy in the club; there's a tightening sensation between her legs, like her cunt's trying to crawl up inside her and get somewhere safe.

And now there's nowhere safe, just this fucking train, so, in the end, she just looks at him until he looks away.

"You don't have to carry everything with you forever," she says.

Physically, she's carrying almost nothing with her. When she was finished, she'd been blood-soaked, down to her bra and panties so she'd stood in the kitchen and stripped, sluiced her skin at the sink and then dressed from her Mom's laundry basket, so she's sitting there in second hand denim and printed floral cotton, white tennis shoes and no underwear, which is exactly as perverse as it ought to be. He's sitting there in black denim, black cotton, black leather. There's no blood on his hands. Headphones draped around his neck. A bulging duffle bag on the seat beside him. There's an Anarchy sign drawn in White Out on the toe of one boot. The train's moving now, and the ratta-tatta rhythm knocks their shoulders against the window. Across the carriage, there's a woman sitting with her head in her hands and a man who's been silently crying since she sat down.

Absently, she wonders how many people _are_ on this fucking train. She wonders where they're going.

He turns his head to look out of the window and there might not be any blood on his hands but there's a lot on the side of his face and matted in his hair.

"I can't see anything," he says, and he sounds so disappointed and so young. She's only twenty. She wonders how many years younger he is. She wonders if it matters.

"Come here," she says.

It's not easy, cleaning away that much blood with spit and tissue, but she does her best. Underneath, his skin is fair and lightly freckled. It feels like he's holding her breath now that he's sitting this close to her. She brushes her thumb against his jaw. Baby soft. He hasn't started shaving yet.

"Good as new," she says, but he just shakes his head and swallows.  
"It was weird," he says. "I sort of thought that they'd start screaming, but...there wasn't really any sound. They all just sort of fell."

Oh, Jesus. Fucking Christ. She imagines him stalking through corridors or a school cafeteria. She imagines his hands not shaking. Blood on grey tile. Monsters and Marilyn Manson songs.

And then she looks at him. She looks at him for a long time.

"There were four of them," she says, finally. "And I meant every single thing."

"Why were you so angry?"

He asks her that and she thinks about the answer. Because her whole life has been fucked up because of them. Because they fucked her before she was even born and because she wants more for her daughter, wants to hope that her little girl's daddy was a good enough guy to balance out all of the shit and all of the hopelessness, that his blood is somehow thicker than hers and, somehow, it's all going to be okay.

"Because it was never enough," she tells him, and she's talking about her whole life up until the day she died. She knows that it's an answer, not an explanation, but it's the best she's got.

He nods, like he's agreeing with her.

"Nobody ever gave a shit about me," he says, miserably, pathetically, and she wants to tell him that it's almost as bad when nobody'll ever leave you alone.

"Come on," she says, tugging him towards her and she doesn't give a shit about him, and she's not saying that she does, but she can, at least, pretend to care about him until they get to where they're going. She was never really religious, never really believed in Heaven or Hell. Maybe, though, there could be an ending. That might be enough.

"I think I'd like to be a butterfly, in my next life," she tells him. Once, she saw this nature documentary about these butterflies, all these butterflies and, every year, they fly from Canada to Mexico, and they hibernate there, hanging from the trees like fruit. It struck her as strange and magical. Beautiful. A world made out of shuddering leaves.

She'd be a butterfly because of the possibility of change.

"I don't want to be anything," he says, quietly. "I hope there's nothing left."

He leans in against her, and he's all awkward angles, sharp shoulder against the jut of one tit and his hair smells like smoke and ashes, but she curls one arm around him anyway. She touches the top of his head, feels the way that his skull doesn't quite meet anymore and it reminds her of her daughter and the way that babies are born with holes already in the head and how bones grow together and wounds heal and become scars, given time and air.

She kisses the top of his head, thinks _fontanel_ and hopes that, wherever they're going, somebody's going to give him a choice.

"Listen," she says, and then she tells him the story about the butterflies.


End file.
